We should be grateful, she has left us with treasures
PRESIDENT Barack Obama shed a tear, Michelle sang along and, sitting next to her, the songwriter Carole King was totally overcome.
On stage Aretha Franklin, magnificent in a lavish floor-length mink coat, was playing piano and singing: “You make me feel like a natural woman…” – the song King wrote and Aretha recorded in 1967.
Now it was December 2015, nearly 50 years on. Both women were 73 years old but this was not nostalgia. The song is a classic and Aretha still had a voice and presence beyond compare.
That is a judgment not open to debate – everybody knew it, especially Aretha.
She still was and will ever be the Queen of Soul.
As a child she was a prodigy. Aged 10 she sang solo in her father’s church Jesus Be A Fence Around Me, a plea for the sort of support she needed then and thereafter. Her mother, who left the family when Aretha was tiny, had died that year.
The little girl had been terribly distressed but as her older sister Erma said: “She transformed her extreme pain into extreme beauty.”
Aretha was a sad, nervous, shy little girl. Yet by the time she was 12 she was on the road performing in her father’s touring gospel show.
The Reverend C L Franklin was Detroit’s leading pastor. His sermons broadcast to thousands, he was a friend of Martin Luther King.
But in 1939, the same year his wife gave birth to their son, Rev Franklin impregnated a 12-year-old girl.
On the gospel tours chastity was certainly not the first commandment and before she was in her teens Aretha was promiscuous.
At 12, she too had given birth to a child. When she was 14 she had her second.
Not surprisingly perhaps, she had trouble with men throughout her life.
Her first husband was a Detroit pimp who did her much emotional harm.
“If she didn’t live it, she couldn’t give it,” said Jerry Wexler, who produced her greatest albums.
Like Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Dinah Washington and other stars of her generation, she started in the church and moved outward. Many regard Amazing Grace, her gospel album from 1972, as her very best.
Aretha, who married for a second time in 1978 to actor Glynn Turman, made lots of money and spent at least as much.
She loved houses, luxury, food, drink and cigarettes (though she overcame the last two).
She was a woman of strong emotions – competitive and envious – hated heights, had a fear of flying and wouldn’t even drive to distant places.
As a teenager she was signed by CBS, where she initially made gospel records.
In 1966, aged 24, she moved to Atlanta and with Wexler made most of the records that render her immortal.
In some ways it was easy: her talent as a pianist, her soulfulness and extraordinary gifts as a singer.
When the classic soul era gave way to funk and disco and heavy rock, Aretha’s sales receded and there followed plenty of missteps as well as many delights.
She was a private person, sometimes a delusional one and, though she could be generous, she was not too concerned about hurting other people’s feelings.
At the time of her death from cancer she was in a serious relationship with her longtime partner, Willie Wilkerson, whom she had first met in the 1980s at an autograph signing in Detroit. Vulnerable, irascible, neurotic, at times morbidly obese, often courting fashion disaster and always burdened with the diva-making belief she was Queen Aretha who must be triumphant and glorified, she was nevertheless a survivor.
Now, as with all artists, her quirks and failings become irrelevant. They die with her.
It is her best work that matters – and for that we should be grateful.
She has left us with treasures.